We run ten web sites running Vista 8.0.3 hf1 where the installs are 99% automated by internally developed scripts. In discussing removing some old monitoring, we discovered one of them has on average 20 times more of the BEA-101017 error than the others. So I went looking for what is causing so many of these errors.

About 9270 of the 9613 in the yet to be rolled logs for BEA-101017 all had to do with “Invalid resource properties – specify path or object id but not both-https://site.view.usg.edu/webct/RelativeResourceManager”. Suspected these exception errors should show in the web server log with the 500 HTTP code for “Server Error”. A simple way to identify them:

grep RelativeResourceManager webserver.log | grep -w 500

Armed with the content=9999999999 value, I used grep to locate which web pages called this URL.

grep -B 10 9999999999 webserver.log | head -50

This pointed me to looking in the HTML for custom web pages. I found CSS using the offending URL as a repeating background for the headers on a navigation bar. There is a blue background color. This image displays a vertical gradient for the same blue. Essentially a fancier version which no one noticed has not worked in the past 7 months. The failure isn’t because of the CSS. This just tells the browser to call the image so if putting the URL in the address bar doesn’t work then I wouldn’t expect the browser to call it from the HTML.

What makes this worse is the image file exists in System Files where it ought to reside for this to work. Also, the URL used appears to make a difference in this case but not others. Other images used on the page work and reside in the same folder in Vista as the failing URL.

Fails: https://site.view.usg.edu/webct/RelativeResourceManager?content=99999999999
Works: https://site.view.usg.edu/webct/urw/lc999999.tp999/RelativeResourceManager?contentID=99999999999

Even worse? Both fail on the test cluster using the content id for that file in that system.

SOLVED:

Overlooked the bad variable “content=”. It should be “contentID=”. Vista doesn’t respond with something like, Content is not a valid variable for the RelativeResourceManager.

P.S. I like grep’s -w flag as it requires spaces around the word. When looking for a number in a web server log, there is a big difference between 500 and 2132500232234. Both would show up for just “grep 500”.